Kenya should emulate South Africa’s politics of ideology

On Wednesday, the world’s attention was on South Africa, as the country went to the polls. The vote marked 25 years since the fall of apartheid, which resulted in the country’s first democratic election in 1994, in which the Black majority voted for the first time. The African National Congress (ANC) emerged victorious, and Nelson Mandela became president.

However, in 2019, the ANC, much as it may carry the day, finds itself in unfamiliar territory, where it has to fight hard to retain its majority, both at the national and provincial levels, since it no longer enjoys the advantage of being the first choice for a majority of Black South Africans.

For the most part, these are repercussions from the liberation movement getting weighed down by an almost suffocating barrage of corruption allegations. The latest culprit is the party’s recently elected secretary general, Ace Magashule — who led the Free State Province for a decade — who, barely a month to the election, was portrayed as a shrewd mafia boss by journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh in his latest investigative book, Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture.

In the weeks preceding the election and before the Magashule book hit the shelves, a number of ANC Cabinet ministers were heavily implicated in the ongoing Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, where damning revelations were made on national TV about them receiving huge bribes in the form of monthly stipends, tens of crates of bottles of expensive whiskey and security and other upgrades done on private residences.

In the end, the ANC’s saving grace lay in the hands of one man — President Cyril Ramaphosa — brought in as the party’s and the country’s president to do damage control after the disastrous Jacob Zuma years. In its public endorsement of the man, barely a fortnight to the elections, The Economist magazine placed the image of a smiling Ramaphosa on its cover, accompanied with the headline ‘South Africa’s best bet’. This was a change of heart by the publication, which in the election five years ago, had endorsed the largest parliamentary opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is dominated by White South Africans, much as it is led by Mmusi Maimane, a Black South African seen as a figurehead.

Due to South Africa’s proportional representation system, voters cast their ballots for political parties as opposed to individuals. Parties are allocated parliamentary seats based on the overall number of votes they get, after which parliament elects a president. To elect Ramaphosa as president, voters had to cast their ballots for the ANC, such that the party musters a comfortable parliamentary majority for the MPs to then elect the president.

The challenge for the ANC has been that consensus, including as articulated by The Economist, is that Ramaphosa is a good man in the wrong party. As one of the wealthiest Black South Africans, he is seen as being more popular among the business elite, who despise the ANC’s ways.

Under different circumstances, Ramaphosa and the ANC could have manoeuvred out of this maze one way or another, were it not for the existence of the second strongest Black parliamentary party, the Julius Malema-led Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), founded by expelled members of the ANC Youth League during the 2014 elections, in which it took six per cent of the vote.

Through parliamentary militancy and an impenetrable grassroots network courtesy of its infamous ground forces, the EFF has established itself as a clear alternative to the ANC, especially among the still disenfranchised Black population. In its inaugural 2014 elections, the party was considered too youthful and somewhat unserious, but five years later, its support has grown from radical youth to include octogenarians.

During their final campaign rallies last Sunday, with the ANC filling up Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg and the EFF filling up Orlando Stadium in Soweto — the DA having held its final rally a day earlier, filling up Dobsonville Stadium in Soweto — the parties differentiated themselves from one another, ideologically.

The ANC’s mantra of ‘Let’s Build South Africa Together’ fed into its non-racist Rainbow Nation ideology, while the EFF’s ‘Our Land and Jobs Now’ spoke to its gospel of emancipating Black South Africans from what it considers economic apartheid perpetuated by white monopoly capital. The DA for its part, with its ‘Together for Jobs’ rallying call, promised nothing radical away from its pro-business posture.

Ideologically, South Africans had actual alternatives from which to elect a government. One hopes that someday Kenyan voters will be accorded such an opportunity, with political parties growing into functional independent institutions with a sense of longevity and some semblance of ideology.